WP2 – Exposure and outcome measurement in public health nutrition

Principal Investigators

Dr Catherine Philips, Mr Sean Millar, Professor Ivan Perry

Overview

The focus of work for WP-2 will be on the development and exploitation of new methods for the assessment of diet and physical activity and the evaluation of key outcomes in public health nutrition, including novel anthropometric indices, measures of subclinical vascular disease and biomarkers. This work will extend the existing work and outputs on dietary pattern analysis and will include new work on meal pattern analyses and work on the analysis of loyalty card dataset from a major Irish food retail chain. It will address measurement error and related methodological issues in the analysis of repeated measures (including repeated Food Frequency Questionnaire’s and dietary recalls, accelerometry data over 7 days and 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure) using latent class methods and functional data analysis.

Overarching objectives/research questions

To use advanced analytic methods to identify diet and activity patterns and compare discriminatory power of different measurements.

To utilize novel and developing digital technologies to improve dietary measurement and classification of diet and physical activity.

To directly influence dietary choices by development of targeted marketplace interventions and decision support software.